Goat Simulator's fourth piece of DLC has landed on consoles. Is it worth adding to your collection or will you end up feeling fleeced?

Talking with NPCs will give you the opportunity to select from several unique dialogue options

Goat Simulator: Waste of Space lets you wreak havoc in an expansive space colony where the opportunities for mayhem are only matched by the profundity of sci-fi references. You begin the DLC by talking to the colony's owner, a Mr. Lawrence S. Windler, who charges you with raising money for his "crowd kicking" project in order to fund improvements to the colony. This is achieved by smashing open money crates you find lying around and also by completing missions. Reaching certain monetary thresholds unlocks new areas to explore and vehicles to use.

In terms of map size, Waste of Space is easily Goat Simulator's largest DLC to date. There are several expansive areas to investigate and quite a lot of variation in each. They include a research dome featuring weird gizmos to mess around with, a space rancher planet, and a passenger craft that lets you romance its crew members Mass Effect style. You can also fly out into space using ships that are scattered around the colony (although the controls are absolutely terrible) and partake in some incredibly bizarre first-person (or first-goat) mini-games such as No Name's Sky in which you have to spam a keyboard in order to make up nonsense names for planets. Even as someone who likes No Man's Sky, I found it pretty funny.

All in all, it's clear that quite a lot of work has gone into this DLC, especially compared to some of the earlier offerings such as the GoatZ add-on. Sci-fi fans in particular should have a lot of fun uncovering the many references to popular TV shows, films and video games that litter the landscape even if many of them are rather cringe-worthy in their attempts at humour.

I think this guy's taking goat simulation a little too far

However, Waste of Space's increased scale doesn't come without problems. One of these is that there are a lot of bland areas between points of interest. As a result, getting around can be tiresome. There is a teleportation system that you can use to alleviate this but in such large areas, it can often be hard to find the access points to use it. The feeling of emptiness is exacerbated by the fact that there aren't a lot of missions to keep you busy and many of those that are there are pretty repetitive. A lot of them simply require you to fetch items back to the quest-giver. This means licking items and dragging them along (often for a long way) which can be very awkward given the wacky and unpredictable physics.

This is also the buggiest Goat Simulator DLC I've played to date. I know it seems ironic to complain about glitches in a game that's partly built around them but some of the ones in Waste of Space are too annoying to laugh off. They include repeatedly falling through floors or passing through walls which forces you to respawn or restart. This can be incredibly annoying if you're in the middle of a mission. One time, I was near the end of completing the expansive Challenge Labs area where you have to solve several puzzle rooms in a row to get a trophy only for the game to bug out on the penultimate puzzle (a cow disappeared through a wall; don't ask) leaving me having to start them again from the beginning. There are also some other technical issues such as the bad frame rate when too much stuff is onscreen (which has affected Goat Simulator since its PlayStation 4 launch), some camera problems, and an incredibly long initial load time.

Using hooves to operate a spacecraft is about as user-friendly as you would expect

More effort has clearly gone into Waste of Space than some of the previous Goat Simulator add-ons but that can't help the fact that the whole joke of the original premise has long since worn thin. With only a few missions to keep you occupied and lots of dead space between the fun stuff, Waste of Space doesn't take long until it starts living up to its name.